Dele Alli needs love and patience to fulfil his potential for Tottenham and England, insists Mauricio Pochettino

Dele Alli has not lived up to the sensational heights of last season but he is young and a little unruly and needs time to grow into his formidable talent

Mauricio Pochettino and Dele Alli enjoy a close relationship (Getty)

Mauricio Pochettino was 21 once. “I did many stupid things,” he recalls, although he declines to name any of them, more for the sake of domestic harmony than for any particular prudishness. “You are going to kill me,” he protests. “My wife is going to see what I say...”

Which is why, even though Pochettino is now nearer 71 than 21, he knows what Dele Alli is going through. The player who Pochettino describes as the best in the world for his age is undergoing perhaps his toughest season in the professional game. Having scored 18 Premier League goals last season, he has scored just a third of that this time. Accusations of diving are beginning to gain traction, not just among referees, but among opponents and rival fans. And only this week, after leaving him out of two successive games, England manager Gareth Southgate has warned him that he is no longer an automatic selection for this summer’s World Cup.

Of course, all kinds of perspective are required here: most players would take a fallow season that included two goals against Real Madrid, an FA Cup semi-final and a likely place in the top four. But equally, this is one of Pochettino’s toughest tests as a manager so far, because rarely if ever will he have dealt with a player of such tender years and such lavish talent, with all the accompanying hype, hysteria and growing pains that entails.

In his book Brave New World, released earlier this season, Pochettino probably devotes more inches to Alli than to any other player in the Tottenham squad. He seems beguiled, bewildered and frustrated in equal measure by a 20-year-old player with all the talent and all the hunger in the world, and yet an occasional preference to live by his own rules. Soon after Alli’s arrival, he calls him into his office to warn him about his lack of effort.

He goes tactically walkabout during the north London derby, which Pochettino decides to allow. Nor is he a stranger to turning up late at training now and again, or putting in less than 100 per cent. And yet his increasing value to the team – recognised not just in goals and assists and international caps, but in three successive new contracts – quickly elevates him to the status of a senior player. “A year ago,” Pochettino writes in the book – and this was back in 2016 – “you could yell at Dele during a session. But now you have to strike a different tone. You have to deal with them more sensitively, grant them the odd privilege that would have been impossible before. It is a very delicate balance.”

Pochettino would probably not be familiar with the English phrase “carrot and stick”, but he would understand it instinctively. “For every player, sometimes there are tough moments,” Pochettino says now. “In those situations, the most important thing is to support him and help him. But not be funny with him, or nice. Sometimes you need to push him and be tough with him. Those situations are in my manager’s room, and of course, we have a lot of chats to try to help.”

It is why he is not shy of loading him with expectation. Whether Alli really is better than Kylian Mbappe, Leroy Sane, Marco Asensio, Ousmane Dembele, Gabriel Jesus or any of a dozen other global talents of his age or younger is, in many ways, immaterial. The key is that Pochettino believes it, and by a process of osmosis, so does Alli himself.

“If I’m ever down,” Alli told FourFourTwo last year, “he can tell straight away. He sees it in your face.”

Dele Alli is embraced by Gianluigi Buffon (AFP/Getty Images)

But equally, it is why Pochettino’s praise and support is always laced with an undercurrent of implied threat. He gives with one hand, and slaps with the other. “The danger,” he writes in his book, “remains that he’ll forget what has got him to this point. I’ve had to repeat that to him this season. The other risk is whether those around him know how to treat a top-level professional. His WhatsApp photo of a cartoon of a boy surrounded by people who all want a piece of him suggests that he needs to be surrounded by the right people.”

Alli recently switched his representation, replacing long-time agent Rob Segal with a multi-pronged management team to look after his many commercial and financial interests. Is he still surrounded by the right people? “He needs to feel the trust, because he is mature enough,” Pochettino replied. “You cannot treat him like a child. If he decides to have people around him, it’s because he believes they are going to help him.

“I am not concerned with how we are going to manage him,” Pochettino continued. “He is a great kid and a very good person. But he is young. He is 21. If you compare him with normal people on the street who are 21, they are still living at home with their parents, they are still at university, doing stupid things.

“Sometimes we expect too much and we put too much pressure on 21-year-old players. Sometimes we forget and treat them like 40-year-old men. It’s a lot of pressure on his shoulders, he can not always act how people and society expect. That is so important to understand. But now it’s a moment to be supportive, and help him to achieve all that he wants. He is one of the best players for his age in the world, not only Europe.”

This is, in many ways, the inevitable corollary of dealing with a young player at the very cusp of superstardom. The rise has been giddying. The journey has been relatively short. It is only three years, after all, since Alli was still back on loan at MK Dons, but training twice a week at Spurs, getting changed in the youth-team dressing room. Which is why, Pochettino insists, Alli still needs a little time, a little love, and not just from his own supporters.

“I think you can see every time that we play away from home, the fans focus on him,” he said. “I think it’s a moment to stop and try to help. Dele will be such an important player for England, not only for Tottenham. It’s a moment not to give presents but to help him, because he is a talent.”